England's first new national forest in more than 30 years will be created between the Cotswolds and the Mendip Hills near Bristol, the government has announced.
Twenty million trees will be planted, as part of a drive to bring greenery closer to people in cities and towns.
'Creating local woodland'
The Western Forest is the first step towards fulfilling Labour's manifesto promise to plant three national forests, and meeting its target of protecting 30% of land for nature by 2030. At least 6,000 acres of woodland will be created across Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset, and the government will be funding the project with up to £7.5m of public money.
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The plan is "not to blanket one contiguous area with new trees", said The Times, but to "intersperse them among farmland and urban areas". Patches of ancient woodland and hedgerows will be expanded, creating "local woodland" in areas where "tree cover" is low, allowing greater access to nature for the millions who live around Bristol, Gloucester, Swindon and Bath.
The new national forest will also help the government's drive to net zero, and support wildlife, creating more habitats for dormice, and for the 35 pine martens reintroduced to the Forest of Dean between 2019 and 2021.
'Increase the pace of tree-planting'
The original National Forest was created in the Midlands in the 1990s. A "glorious forest" was "built from scratch", said The Telegraph, as 200 sq miles of "mine-scarred landscape" across Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire were replanted with 9.8 million trees.
The total area of woodland across the whole of the UK is currently estimated at 3.28 million hectares (7 million acres) and some 13% of the total land area. New trees are planted every year – official figures record about 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) of newly created woodland in 2023 – but the new Western Forest project will "increase the pace of tree-planting", said The Times, in an effort to help the government reach its target of 16.5% forest cover by 2050.
'Much more to do'
Alex Stone, the chief executive of Forest of Avon Trust, which is leading the tree-planting project, said the charity is "thrilled to have led a wonderfully diverse and engaged" partnership to "bring the Western Forest to life".
The project is about resource and expertise coming "directly to landowners, partners and communities, planting millions of trees in the right places".
But Andy Egan, head of conservation policy at the Woodland Trust, told the BBC that, while there had been "significant progress" on tree planting, there was still "much more to do" to meet targets, and a "tough public spending environment" could "risk undoing much of the good work".
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